Jane Powell Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Sunny star of MGM musicals who had the role of a lifetime in
JANE POWELL, who has died aged 92, was the singing star of more than a dozen MGM musicals, and best remembered as the girl who brought Howard Keel and his clan to heel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
It was her only smash hit. Though she enjoyed star status from her earliest films, they were often relegated to the second half of double bills and she was better known as a personality than for her movies.
Petite, blonde (usually), blue-eyed and with a relentlessly sunny disposition, Jane Powell could be cloying on screen. She hankered after meatier roles, but studio boss Louis B Mayer refused. He was wiser than she knew, for there is no evidence that she could have played the parts she sought. Her one stab at heavy drama, The Female Animal, required her to play a drunk scene. It was not well received.
What she could do was sing. Her gift was spotted and encouraged from childhood, resulting in a chirrupy soprano similar to but less fragile than that of her friend and studio colleague Kathryn Grayson. Grayson took risks on the high notes and sometimes came a cropper, but audiences forgave her.
Powell took no risks, staying comfortably within her vocal range. But it meant that there was never any excitement, or danger, when she sang. She was a mite predictable, and came to be viewed as the girl next door, or everybody’s kid sister. Film fans rarely lost their hearts to her as they did to Kathryn Grayson.
As an interviewee, she could be naive: once, waxing lyrical to a reporter about her family’s fully stocked nuclear survival shelters, she said the children were so excited they could hardly wait.
The daughter of a baby-food salesman, she was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1 1929 in Portland, Oregon. (Her professional name was taken from her character in her first film, Song of the Open Road, in 1944.) At seven she was singing on children’s radio, but did not begin professional training until 11. She soon got her own show at the radio station KOIN, and at rallies for the war effort she was billed as Oregon’s Victory Girl.
After Grant High School, she went with her parents on holiday to Los Angeles, where they entered her in a talent competition. She won, trilling an aria from Carmen, and was spotted by MGM talent scouts. Invited to the studio for an audition, she was placed under contract without a screen test. She was only 15.
MGM put her under the wing of producer Joe Pasternak, who had made a star of another teenage canary, Deanna Durbin. In case Jane did not live up to the studio’s hopes, she was lent out for two films to United Artists. But Song of the Open Road and Delightfully Dangerous (1945) amply fulfilled expectations and, from then on, MGM kept her on a string.
Her first feature for the studio was Holiday in Mexico (1946; she sang Ave Maria) followed by a string of minor musicals in which she was generally cast as a schoolgirl. These included A Date with Judy (1948) and Two Weeks with Love and Nancy Goes to Rio in 1950. The last was intended as the pilot for a series of films in which Nancy would also visit Rome and Paris. But box-office returns were disappointing and the sequels were cancelled. It was a shaky start, broken in 1951 with Royal Wedding (shown in Britain as Wedding Bells). Jane Powell was not the first choice to be Fred Astaire’s singing and dancing partner. MGM would have preferred Judy Garland or June Allyson, but neither was available. Powell stepped into the breach to play Fred’s sister, accompanying him to England to see “the” royal wedding (presumably Princess Elizabeth’s, though it is not explicit).
Nobody would claim that she was one of Astaire’s best dancing partners, but she did well enough and the film earned a place in the record books for the longest song title in a musical: How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?
This was the best picture she had yet been offered, but she had to revert to three more ingénue roles in Rich, Young and Pretty (1951), Small Town Girl (1953) and Three Sailors and a Girl (1953) before landing the role of a lifetime in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Once again MGM toyed with other singers before she won the part.
Based on Plutarch’s account of the rape of the Sabine women, this was the tale of seven rough-and-ready brothers who abduct their brides in the Wild West only to find, as in the Greek play
Lysistrata, that conjugal rights are denied until they bathe and acquire some manners. Jane Powell played Howard Keel’s bride, who organises the sex-ban and drills the boys into shape. A catchy score by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul gave everyone in the cast something memorable to sing. Powell’s numbers were the popular Spring, Spring, Spring and Going Courtin’.
Alas, this was the high-water mark of the MGM musical. As tastes changed, the studio began to phase out the genre with which it had come to be identified. Powell featured in only three more: Athena (1954), a thin satire on health farms, in which she sang an aria from Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment; Hit the Deck (1955), adapted from an old Broadway musical; and Deep in My Heart (1955), a biopic of composer Sigmund Romberg, where she made only a guest appearance singing a duet with Vic Damone from Romberg’s Maytime.
Complaining that MGM had never allowed her to grow up, she struck out on her own and signed a three-picture deal with RKO. The first was another feeble comedy, The Girl Most Likely
(1957), followed by The Female Animal and Enchanted Island (1958), in which she was miscast as a native girl opposite Dana Andrews. That was to be her last film for 27 years.
Instead she switched to television, cabaret and the stage. On TV, she co-starred with Michael Redgrave in Ruggles of Red Gap in 1957 and two years later played the Judy Garland role in a remake of Meet Me in St Louis.
She featured in a TV movie, Mayday at 40,000 Feet! (1976) which secured a cinema release in Britain.
She toured in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, South Pacific and My Fair Lady
and scored a personal triumph succeeding Debbie Reynolds in Irene on Broadway in 1974. The next year she was cast with Dick Van Dyke in a cartoon of Tubby the Tuba; she did a cameo, singing at a political rally, for the Sissy Spacek movie Marie (1985); and her final TV appearance was in 2002, as an old lady in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
She released an aerobics video, and in 1988 an autobiography, The Girl Next Door … and How She Grew.
Jane Powell was married five times (divorced four): first to ice skater Geary Steffen; second to stockbroker Patrick Nerney; third to agent James Fitzgerald; fourth to producer David Parlour; and fifth to the former child star Dickie Moore, who died in 2015. She is survived by a son and a daughter from her first marriage, and a daughter from her second.